


A Hard and Bitter Peace

by Gairid



Category: Vampire Chronicles - All Media Types, Vampire Chronicles - Anne Rice
Genre: Angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-06-12
Updated: 2011-06-12
Packaged: 2017-10-20 08:58:30
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 624
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/211013
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gairid/pseuds/Gairid





	A Hard and Bitter Peace

I placed the phone in its cradle carefully, as though handling a bomb. I stood looking at it for a space of minutes, wondering at the crushing feeling of relief overlaid with pain so great that I could not draw breath, could not, in fact move a muscle.

He was alive. Lestat was alive, though horribly burned, horribly weakened.

This is what David Talbot told me, speaking in a subdued, respectful voice from his home far away from this seething frenetic city perched on the southern rim of North America. Alive, though he had faced the sun, not once, but twice in a desert on the other side of the world.

I'd known this somehow, after the original shock of understanding what he'd gone off to do while I slept the sleep of the dead. The first shock came during that sleep in the form of a soundless, agonized cry that punched through the barrier that barred his thoughts from me, a cry that was sheared off as quickly as it had come.

I have some memory of awakening in my own agony, aware only blearily of my actual surroundings and the fact the Brian was nearby, his familiar scent laced with fear and pity and pain that mirrored some of mine. I spoke to him before I was drawn inexorably back down into that sleep, deathsleep, that prison. After sunset I heard their voices, those others in the world like me, some concerned, others grief-stricken in their own way but others insisting he was not gone, not severed from the world and I felt this myself for if he were truly gone I don't know that I would have awakened at all.

So, relief, yes because he lived yet and the relief was entwined tightly with pain, exquisitely wrought, because he decided to die without a word to me. There was also a horrid, sneaking jealousy that, surviving such a thing, he chose to go to someone else for succor, a mortal who he barely knew.

What did I do next? I gave myself over to these emotions, I let them swallow me whole because sometimes you just have to drown.

Weeks passed and I heard nothing from Lestat. The nights passed with a numbing sameness—waking alone, sitting rigid in a chair on the balcony, a bench in Jackson Square, walking the city until I was driven by a thirst that was insurmountable and then I would give in and bathe in blood, drink to satiation---do what it was in my nature to do as Lestat had once said to me. When I lay, captivated by the swoon, those words echoed in my head and I could think only that I wished him actually dead so that I,too, could end my own life at last, a stolen life to be sure and one that I had wanted for only one reason.

Or so I thought. Lestat's continued absence became once again normal, a thing that presented pain only when I allowed myself to dwell upon it. I took up the threads of my unraveled existence and began once again to weave them into something that resembled life because if he existed still, then so must I.

Brian asked me one night if I was feeling 'better', and because he had taken such care with me over the passing months I did not find it in me to hurt him; Lestat's absence had caused him a good deal of pain. I told him that I had found a sort of hard peace, hard and bitter, but a semblance of peace just the same. We walked in silence for awhile before he turned his head and looked at me.

“Liar.” he said.


End file.
